Earthborn Page 3

  ‘Americans of Welsh descent,’ said Alison softly. ‘The Gwynns are a very old family and that, for now at least, is who we are.’

  So the story of ‘The Faraway Planet’ could safely take its place alongside, ‘The Little Matchgirl’, ‘The Tin Soldier’ and ‘Cinderella’. There were so many different stories, but none of them was really, really true. Young as she was, she already knew that. Children are born knowing that stories are safe.

  Nesta’s eyes shut tight. She was fast asleep.

  Alison bent over and kissed her, stroking the soft hair back from her forehead.

  ‘Nallytan, Neshayla ban,’ she said very softly in tones not of this Earth, and in a language that was definitely not English, and not even Welsh.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  The Signal

  On the Wednesday of that week in January, Matthew stayed home, tensely waiting. Nesta went off to school as usual, unaware that anything untoward was happening. She was always the first to leave the house: school was a good long bus-ride away. Matthew’s bank was much closer and he usually went by car. Alison’s work at the university was part-time, and much of it she did at home.

  ‘I think you should tell her tonight,’ said Matthew. ‘We can both tell her, if you like, but I think she will be more comfortable hearing it from you.’

  Alison gave her husband a look of amusement. She had long since grown to know and love his Earth face – his crinkled fair hair that never looked quite as neat as it should, his blue eyes that were wide and innocent. On their home planet, he had looked very different of course, but the character that looked out of those innocent eyes was the same. He was the dreamer of dreams, she was the practical one.

  ‘I think we should wait till you know that they want to talk to you,’ she said. ‘There has been no signal yet. If you have to go for instructions, then I shall be left alone with Nesta, for however long it takes. Then will be time enough to tell her.’

  Matthew still looked worried.

  ‘We don’t even know what the signal will be. This has never arisen before. What if I don’t recognize it?’

  ‘You will,’ said Alison. ‘There would be no point otherwise. And if no signal comes within the next three days, I think you should enter the ship in any case.’

  ‘I can’t do that!’ said Matthew. ‘How could I do that? Unless I am wanted, it won’t let me in.’

  ‘And if it won’t let you in,’ said his wife logically, ‘then you mustn’t be wanted and we can just forget all about it till June.’

  But the signal did come. And in a way that was surprisingly easy.

  Early on Thursday morning, well before daylight, the clock radio by their bed began to buzz like an angry bee. The buzz grew louder till first Alison and then Matthew woke up. Alison stared in silence at the clock’s red digits but her tired senses could not register the time.

  ‘What on earth is that?’ said Matthew, yawning.

  At the sound of his voice, the buzzing stopped.

  Then a voice he recognized, a metallic, staccato voice, began to speak. Matthew had heard it every year for the past fourteen years; every year from the first to the third of June, this voice had fed him information and asked him questions. Now it was speaking out of the radio in his room. Its English, as always, was not quite on key and sounded foreign. Its timbre was much more metallic than usual, as if this unaccustomed medium interfered with its clarity.

  ‘You-have-heard-the-news,’ it grated. ‘There-is-need-to-instruct. Tomorrow-after-sunset-you-must-come-to-the-source.’

  That was all. The clock went back to being its normal self.

  ‘So that’s it,’ said Matthew. He sat up and swung his feet to the floor.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Alison with a sigh. ‘But do get back into bed, Mattie. It’s only four o’clock. It will be easier to think it all out in the morning. These Earth bodies need their sleep!’

  But when morning came it brought no relief. The whole of Thursday passed like time spent in a waiting room.

  On Friday, Nesta set off for school totally unaware of the shocks life had in store for her. Alison went with her to the gate, not something she always did, but not altogether unusual.

  ‘Take care,’ she said, giving her a parting hug.

  ‘I will, Mom,’ said Nesta, smiling. ‘Take care, yourself!’

  ‘It looks like rain,’ said her mother. ‘Have you got your umbrella?’

  ‘Here in my bag,’ said Nesta, pointing down to the pouch that held it.

  ‘Well, bye then, and take care,’ said Alison again.

  Nesta gave her a quizzical look.

  ‘Have you got a premonition or something?’ she said with a laugh. ‘I always take care! And if I don’t go soon, I’ll miss the bus!’

  Alison stood and watched her to the end of the street where she turned and waved.

  ‘Did you say anything to her?’ asked Matthew when she went indoors.

  ‘No, not yet. This afternoon will be time enough. What could I possibly say in five minutes?’

  They sat by the fire, saying little but thinking more.

  ‘I do want to go back,’ said Matthew after one long silence. ‘The will-o’-the-wisp memory of Ormingat haunts me, as if there were a great emptiness in my life. There are mornings even now when I feel like poor old Caliban, awakening from a dream of sounds that give delight and hurt not . . .’

  ‘I know,’ said Alison, not totally convinced. ‘And the joy of going home ought to be uppermost in my mind too, but this is home for me now, this Earth, this town, this street, this house. Oh Mattie, I love England as if I had been born here.’

  ‘You will carry the memory with you, Athelerane,’ said Matthew softly. ‘It will be part of your being.’

  ‘Like the memory of Ormingat?’ said his wife with a smile enigmatic and sad.

  ‘Probably,’ said Matthew, taking her hand in his. ‘It is not such a bad way to remember.’

  But his imagination went far beyond hers. His vision of Ormingat was spiritual; hers was physical and somehow false. No two beings in the universe are totally identical; and those who think have each their own array of thoughts.

  At three o’clock, Matthew and Alison went out in silence to drain the pond at the bottom of the back garden. It was not raining, but moisture hung in the air and Mattie’s hand and arm were chilled to the bone as he reached down into the pondweed to pull out the plug.

  ‘Now we shall wait for Nesta,’ said Alison as the water drained sluggishly away leaving slimy green fronds clinging to the basin. It was not quite like the normal garden pond. In its centre, on a great stone lily pad, sat what can be best described as a monolith, carved in the form of a frog.

  CHAPTER 6

  * * *

  The Shock

  When Nesta came home from school, it was already dusk. She let herself into the house, as she always did, and called out, ‘Mom, I’m home.’

  The answer came from the direction of the kitchen.

  ‘Your father and I are in the back garden, Nesta,’ said her mother’s voice. ‘There’s something we have to show you. Come straight out.’

  Nesta hurried through the kitchen to the back of the house, wondering what the something could be. The light above the porch was lit, but the garden itself was in shade. Nesta was puzzled as to what they should have to show her out there on such a dull, cold afternoon.

  Her mother was wearing her thick fleece jacket and winter boots. She was standing, arms folded, outside on the patio. Her smile, as she looked at her daughter, was a little nervous. This way of doing things had been her husband’s idea; Alison was not at all sure that it was really the best way. But she had not been able to think of a better, given how little time there was.

  ‘We’ve drained the pond,’ she said, ‘but we waited for you to come home before moving the frog from its pad.’

  Nesta was mystified.

  ‘But it’s not June,’ she said, looking from one parent to the othe
r. ‘We only ever move the frog on the first of June.’

  ‘The day your father goes on his business trip,’ said her mother very deliberately. ‘But the trip is earlier this year.’

  Every year, on the first of June, Father would go away for three days on a ‘business trip’. This was what her parents called it and Nesta did not bother to question them. It was clearly something to do with his work at the bank. So Nesta thought.

  There was just this one strange ritual that might have made it seem different. The night before he left, the pond in the back garden was always drained and the grey stone frog that squatted in the centre was lifted, with difficulty, from its grey stone lily pad. It was possibly the biggest, heaviest garden ornament in the world, created by some weird, outlandish sculptor obsessed with incongruous size, a bulldozer of a bullfrog if ever there was one!

  For as long as she could remember, Nesta had watched the fun as her parents lugged the monster on to the lawn. When Father came home, the whole thing would go into reverse: the frog would sit once more on its pad and the pond would be refilled with water. The pond itself was quite modest, a shallow moat around the statuary.

  Nesta gave her mother a look of astonishment. Till now it seemed that draining the pond was a thing to do in early summer, maybe to clean it. That it had always coincided with her father’s departure had been just that – pure coincidence. They could not possibly be connected.

  Could they?

  ‘But, but . . . what has draining the pond to do with it? And moving the frog?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said her mother. ‘You will be amazed, shocked even, but we can’t think of any other way to make you believe the thing we have to tell you.’

  Matthew stood by, looking uncomfortable. Even he was not completely sure how his idea would work out.

  ‘We should move the frog now,’ he said. ‘There’s no point in waiting any longer. It’ll soon be pitch dark.’

  So he and Alison stepped down into the basin of the pond and stood one either side of the large stone frog. They gripped it with both hands.

  ‘Push,’ said Matthew.

  ‘Pull,’ said Alison. ‘Pull harder.’

  The soles of her boots slid against the wet pondweed. Gripping the cold stone was numbing her fingers. It was definitely harder to move in winter than in summer. For some minutes it seemed as if it would not move at all.

  Then, at long last, the frog gave a groan and swung over from the pad, up the pond basin and on to the lawn, Matthew and Alison rolling it to its usual resting place.

  ‘Phew!’ said Alison. ‘That thing must weigh a ton! It never gets any easier!’

  ‘Now I suppose we go into the house,’ said Nesta, eyeing both parents apprehensively, ‘and Father gets ready to go.’

  At that moment the only explanation she could come up with for their strange behaviour was that this must be some New England superstition. Take a St Christopher medal in the car . . . Drain the garden pond and move the frog before you go on a journey . . .

  Surely her parents were too intelligent to think like that?

  But it got worse.

  ‘Not this time,’ said her mother. ‘This time we miss out the charade. Your father is ready to go now, and that is where he is going.’

  She pointed to the centre of the lily pad.

  ‘Do you remember the story of the Faraway Planet?’ she said softly. ‘The one I told you when you were very young?’

  Nesta did remember. She had not thought of it for years. But she did remember. Thinking back, it was not quite like the other fairytales: it had a place and some activity, but no beginning or end. The characters were not elves or fairies but her own mother and father. The main event was just a journey, safely accomplished in an incredibly small spaceship.

  ‘That story,’ said her mother carefully, ‘is true. The secret name of the planet, I can tell now, is Ormingat. Tonight you are going to see evidence of the truth of the story, not the whole truth, but enough to show you that it is more than just another fairytale.’

  Nesta looked appalled. It seemed to her now that one or both of her parents had gone completely insane. Matthew realized how bewildered she was, and how much more bewildered she was about to be. He put his arms around her and gave her a hug.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘it will be all right. It will be more all right than you can possibly imagine.’

  Alison gave her husband a look of impatience. It was no use being so hopeful at this stage. Nesta was already rejecting what they were trying to tell her. That was only too clear.

  ‘Come by me,’ said her mother, ‘and I shall try to explain exactly what is going to happen next. In the very centre of the lily pad there is a shaft leading down into the earth. That is where our spaceship is, sinking lower down each year. From the very start our stay was scheduled to be for twenty years. After that, our engineers say that the depth will be too great: the ship is being pulled by gravity. It is very heavy and very dense. Every year, your father goes down and checks everything. He communicates with Ormingat, gives information about the Earth and its people, and receives instructions for the year ahead. Other observers work in different ways: we are long-term operatives and that is our way.’

  Alison paused, giving her daughter a chance to digest this, a chance to speak. The old story had been intended to support this revelation, to make their daughter more ready to accept the truth of it. A vain hope!

  Nesta simply looked at her mother in dazed amazement. Her parents were mad; they were both mad. No other explanation would come to mind. It was frightening. She was being asked to believe the impossible.

  ‘To go into the spaceship,’ continued her mother, ‘he has to diminish – you remember the word? It was one you always liked. Every part of him becomes smaller till he is small enough to enter a different dimension.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ said Nesta slowly, giving both parents a cautious look. ‘Then does he fly away for his business trip?’

  It was as if she had decided to humour their insanity. These could not be the parents she had known and loved all her life.

  ‘No,’ said her mother with a laugh, ‘he is never further than the bottom of the garden. The spaceship will not move till it is ready to return to Ormingat. But watch now: actions speak louder than words. Stand here with me.’

  It was cold and, though it wasn’t raining, the air was damp. Nesta was still wearing her school coat, but she shivered. She really did not know what to think. Even the way her mother spoke the name of the planet was so foreign she could not hear it properly and the voice could have been that of a ventriloquist. What on earth were they up to?

  ‘I hate jokes,’ she muttered into her collar, suddenly feeling that if they were not mad they must be up to some stupid trick. Stupid was preferable, but irritating. ‘I’m too old for silly games.’

  ‘Hush,’ said her mother. ‘It’s not a game. Just wait and see.’

  Matthew said nothing.

  He walked away from them, into the gloom. But his outline was still clearly visible as he stepped down into the circle of cement that formed the bowl of the pond. He went to the centre, bent down and reached with his right hand into the middle of the lily pad. There was a sudden shaft of blue light, like a brief flash of lightning. Then Matthew shrank into the earth as if he liquefied. In the blink of an eye, no part of him was visible.

  Nesta gasped. Then she slumped against her mother in a dead faint. It took some seconds for her to become even semiconscious again. Alison held her up and half carried her into the house.

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  Let it not be true

  For the second time in less than a year, Alison used the power of Ormingat, a weak strain admittedly, but adequate for use on this Earth. This time her reason was more urgent. This time she felt not the slightest guilt: the power was passing from like to like, from mother to daughter.

  Nesta was lying stiffly on the sofa, still in her outdoor coat. Her eyes were op
en but glazed and she was trembling in every limb. She had just seen her father disappear into the earth. An ordinary, solid human being had been sucked into nothingness, before her very eyes. This was shock on a massive scale. The heart might fail with it; the brain might snap.

  ‘Heal hands,’ said Alison urgently, touching the slim fingers that quivered uncontrolled. The hands grew still and the body turned limp.

  ‘Heal little heart,’ said Allison as she gently undid the buttons on Nesta’s coat and drew unresisting arms from each sleeve.

  ‘Heal mind and soul and understanding,’ she said, holding her daughter’s head between her hands.

  For moments that seemed interminable, nothing happened.

  ‘Mind and soul and understanding, heal!’ Alison said quite harshly, willing the power to be strong enough.

  Then she gave a sigh of relief as her daughter’s eyes lost their trancelike gaze.

  Nesta looked directly at her mother and said sharply, ‘Why did you never tell me about this before? I had a right to know.’

  Alison sat down beside her daughter on the sofa, one arm round her shoulders. Dusk had turned to dark and the room was lit only by the firelight.

  ‘Children cannot be told things that they might even accidentally betray,’ she said.

  ‘I am nearly thirteen,’ said Nesta. ‘I am not a child.’

  ‘No,’ said her mother, ‘but you are not far from childhood.’

  ‘And all that about the Faraway Planet?’ said Nesta, remembering the old story and trying to make sense of it. ‘You muddled it all up with the elves and the shoemaker. And you let me go on thinking that you came from Boston. You don’t come from Boston?’

  ‘No,’ said her mother. ‘We have never been anywhere near Boston. When I told you that story you really were a child and I was bound to tell you childish things. The truth was disguised as fiction because that was deemed safer – to plant a hint in your mind, like a seed buried in soil. The real fiction was always Boston, not just for you but also for the world outside. And it had to sound as genuine as possible.’